Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

Alex Iskold at the Read/WriteWeb blog wrote an excellent essay on software development. His article reminds us that software development is an evolution process.

In the 70’s people thought the process of software development should be about the same as the process of civil engineering — gather requirements, then write code, then do testing, and then finally delivery the software to the client. Based on our experiences, we learned that this model doesn’t work. Software development is a non-linear process — requirements can change while the development is still going on. For that reason, we need a more agile development methodology — e.g., release often, embrace changes, refactor, and do unit tests.

Through out the years, not only our software development process has evolved, but also the characteristics of our programming languages have changed. We no longer program with the “programming languages”, but we program with their built-in libraries. C and C++ are great programming languages, but their programming libraries are not as rich as Java, for example. In the community adoption of scripting languages, we have evolved from Perl and PHP to Python and Ruby.

The science of software development is relatively young comparing to other fields of engineering. It’s amazing to see how much has changed in the past short 30 years. I wonder how we will change again in the next 30 years?

This blog will be very quiet next week because I’m on vacation in Europe. I’ve selected few blog posts and web links. For those who are new to this blog, you may find them to be interesting.

• Digital Facsimile: Google Map of Mexcio in 1550
• Mixing RDF/A with GeoRSS
• Searching Geospatial Ontologies in Swoogle
• Semantic Web Services — The Ugly Stepchildren
• The New Sense of the Web, OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook, January 03, 2006. (podcast)
• The Quest for Reliable Directions, NRP, January 10, 2006. (podcast)

I bookmarked few RSS feeds of search queries from ask.com. These feeds collect daily blog posts that are related to “geospatial semantic web“, “semantic web“, and “GIS geospatial“. Links to those feeds can be found in the “Bookmarks” page.

RSS feeds of search queries are nothing new. All major search engines offer this service. However, there is something novel about how ask.com builds its blog search capability. According to this press release, the search capability is built on the blog subscription information from the popular blog reader application — bloglines.com.

Ask Blog & Feed Search takes an entirely new approach to searching the blogosphere. First, instead of crawling, Ask Blog & Feed Search harnesses the subscription data of hundreds of thousands of real people who use Bloglines to create our search index.

“On the blogosphere, people provide the best way to discover the freshest, highest-quality feeds — information that isn’t exposed to crawlers,” said Apostolos Gerasoulis, executive vice president of search technology at Ask.com. “In addition, this ‘collective human intelligence’ provides a natural defense against spam, as people typically do not subscribe to low-quality content.”

For more comments about ask.com’s new blog search capability, see also eBiquity and TechCrunch.

Today I added a new page that collects podcast shows that discuss geospatial technology and the Semantic Web. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet seen shows that specifically focus on the cross-fertilazation of the two technologies. I hope this is going to change in the near future.

http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/podcasts/?

I’ve created a page with geospatial semantic web links. I hope readers of this blog will find these bookmarks to be useful.

http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/bookmarks/

If you have other links to suggest, please let me know — email me or add comments to the page.